Creative practices for becoming-with death while vitally alive

Abstract

My research is located in my community in Gawler, South Australia and positioned in the research fields of death and extinction studies. My original contribution to knowledge is to theorise, through a post-qualitative lens, my lived experience of facilitating community events that generatively engage people with death through creative practice. This dissertation emerged over seven years into a multi-layered, philosophical exploration of our social-political-ecological relationship with death in the context of climate change, mass species extinction and the global pandemic. The sudden death of my son, Robbie, in a car crash led to the initiation of doctoral research and a creative practice of becoming-with death while vitally alive. The overarching research question became, after many iterations: How can we collaborate with death in ways that will enliven and activate us rather than frighten and freeze our ability to respond to climate change, the global pandemic and mass extinction and how might one live/die at this moment in time? … and … and … and … The methodology rhizomatically shifted from a critical post-human auto-ethnography to a performative assemblage/auto-ethnography during the process of casting a provocative post-qualitative gaze from the speculative middle over the concept of death literacy. Section one shares how facilitating Death Cafés evolved into generative human/more-than-human encounters that diffracted into a gentle becoming-friends and then becoming-kin with Death. Section two delves into the methods we use in Australia to dispose of our human bodies and how these methods often damage the earth. Participants in the Eco Coffin Project explore over six months the question: What is a sustainable death? These 10-15 people experientially learn about the Australian death system while re/thinking their end-of-life plan through the creative practice of decorating either an eco-coffin or making a shroud. These exquisite dartaphacts are then shared with the public through exhibitions, both in person and online. The anthropocentric life/death binary is troubled when corpses become vitally alive compost and in doing so become more-than-human. Section three explores the evanescence of things through both the concept of becoming im/perceptible and the Japanese philosophy of wabi sabi. While shifting my son’s clothes a creative practice emerged from encounters with the affect of inhuman animacies that I call: Upcycling grief: Transforming what remains into things of usefulness and beauty. Two memory quilts were co-created from Robbie’s clothes, opening up a line of flight to connect with the traces we leave behind. Again, the life/death binary became disrupted with the question: Do we ever really die? During the study I have moved from a position, supported in the literature, that we are unfamiliar with death, that death is taboo and that we deny death to the proposition that we are unprepared to respond with death. I posit that the creative practices generated throughout this inquiry offer one line of flight to fill this gap so we can become practically and emotionally prepared to respond with death in these increasingly socio-enviro-politically uncertain times.

Date of Award	2022
Original language	English
Supervisor	Tonia Gray (Supervisor)